


you taste like birthday, you look like new year

by singmyheart



Series: the book of love has music in it [5]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda (Broadway Cast) RPF
Genre: Anniversary, Dorks in Love, Family Drama, M/M, also straight razors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-30
Updated: 2017-05-30
Packaged: 2018-11-06 16:28:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11039934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singmyheart/pseuds/singmyheart
Summary: Lin’s study is comfortingly cluttered, which is to say it looks like a war zone, in the particular way it does when he’s writing. Alex manages to excavate the couch from under a pile of books and sits, listens to Lin noodle around at the piano for a minute or two, just fidgeting. He’s got the next show brewing; even if he hadn’t said so Alex would be able to tell. He’s always got something brewing, but Hamilton had felt like this: change in the air like a gathering storm, the far-off rumble of thunder.





	you taste like birthday, you look like new year

 

 

 

Tommy’s clearly developing some kind of Pavlovian response to the phone ringing — it’s either a world-weary sort of resignation, skin-crawling annoyance, or some unholy combination of the two. He’s pacing now; every so often he’ll sigh and roll his eyes so hard they’re in danger of falling out of his head. Virginia slipping back into his voice like it always does when he talks to his parents, just a little, around the vowels. “I know,” he’s saying, all the scathing, barely-contained venom and impatience he must have had at eighteen (the bare feet and faded, threadbare Wesleyan shirt are doing nothing to undercut this image). “No. No, I know. We’re not moving venues, this place is big enough… yes, I’m sure. _Yes._ Jesus, no — I’m not _taking a tone,_ I’m just — I know.”

Alex half-listens through another ten minutes or so before he finally hangs up, and it’d probably be funnier if he weren't so obviously miserable. He collapses facedown onto the couch and groans, which is becoming a habit. “Lac,” he mumbles into the cushion, and then surfaces. “Lac. Kindly murder me.”

Alex doesn’t even do him the courtesy of looking up from his book. “Yeeeah, no.”

“If you love me —”

“If —”

“If you care for me at all you’ll come over here right now and just — snap my neck. Something quick. I won’t even fight it.”

“After exactly zero consideration, I’m gonna take a hard pass on this one.”

“I can’t believe you won’t even entertain the thought of ending my life and thus my torment. I’d do it for you.”

“Put that in your speech, would you.” Tommy lets out a sustained, wounded-animal sort of noise in response. Alex sighs and joins him on the couch, manhandles him a little until they’re comfortable, Tommy’s chest warm against his back. “Is this a real problem?”

“Hm?”

“Do you really, really not want to do this?”

“I wouldn’t say that. I mean, I wish it was more on our terms, excepting that on our terms…”

“Would be to not do it.”

“Yeah.” He props his chin on Alex’s shoulder, sighs. “It’s just _unnecessary._ After eight years, to be like, hey, look at us? In front of all my parents’ friends and a million cousins I see once a decade? There’s a reason we didn’t do the whole big wedding.”

“I know, I was there.”

“My mom wants your half of the guest list confirmed, by the way. Like, they’re coming confirmed, not Catholic confirmed. I assume.”

“You did tell her that my half of the guest list like, ninety percent overlaps with your half, right?” A moment passes, and Alex can only imagine the look he’s being given right now. “Of course you told her. Sure.”

 

*

 

When Tommy had first broken the news to him he’d looked so stressed out that Alex had been a little afraid someone had died, or something. That Tommy began the conversation with, “So, I spoke to my mom today” didn’t exactly help.

As it turned out, no one had died. Somehow — Tommy had explained but Alex still isn’t really sure how — Tommy’s parents had managed to strong-arm him and by extension Alex into hosting a party to celebrate their upcoming first anniversary (and happy visions of holing up for forty-eight hours to do nothing but lie in bed, order takeout and then eat it off of each other crumbled into ash). “Really, Tom, I don’t see why you’re so upset at the very _idea_ ," Tommy had said, the imitation of his mother’s voice both mocking and uncannily accurate. “I hate her.”

“She is aware that this is exactly what we didn’t want?” Alex had asked, mildly.

“Oh, she’s aware. It’s just that I cruelly deprived her and my dad of the opportunity to watch their only son get married —”

“They literally watched us get married.”

“I know, I know. Fucking — she kept saying we should’ve had a _real wedding,_ because our legally binding city hall ceremony at which we exchanged rings evidently did not count. I _hate_ her.”

“You do not hate her.” Alex had taken his hand, kissed the back of it. “For what it’s worth, it was plenty real to me.”

“Well, that’s incredibly gay of you.” A beat while Alex chewed on it, and then Tommy caught the look on his face and said, flatly, “No.”

“You don’t even —”

“No. Nononononono, I don’t like that face, don’t even say it —”

“Come on. Would it be that bad? If it’ll make her happy? Or get her off your back, at least?”

Tommy had looked utterly betrayed, which struck Alex as a _little_ dramatic.

 

*

 

So Tommy’s been spending a lot of time on the phone with his mom lately, who’s clearly trying to co-plan this thing long-distance (he’d put his foot down: “I am not dragging Alex and all of our friends out to goddamn Alexandria, ma.”) He doesn’t talk to his parents all that often, as a rule; Alex has only met them a dozen times. They’re perfectly nice people, but — well. Suffice to say, Alex no longer has any questions as to why Tommy is the way he is.

It’s the kind of thing that makes him grateful for his own family, who are pushy and loud and sometimes infuriating but at least they say what they mean. They don’t necessarily Get It — it’d taken getting married for them to fully understand he and Tommy are a little more than roommates — but their hearts are in the right place, generally.

He catches himself thinking about when he’d been home last, over Christmas: he’d run into his high school sweetheart, which was a little surreal. Anna’s married now, to a surgeon, three beautiful kids (whom he hears about yearly via her Christmas newsletter, because she’s one of those people). She was cute and almost ruthlessly sensible even at eighteen and they’d had two good years on and off, mostly on, Alex-and-Anna, making out in her dad’s car to Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains. They’d ended up calling it quits just before college and parted ways more or less amicably.  

He’d run into her in the grocery store in Miami and they’d spent a good twenty minutes standing in the aisle just shooting the shit. “I just got married, actually, over the summer,” he’d confessed, the whole blushing newlywed routine; it’s nauseating.

“Oh my _god_ ,” she’d said, and lit up, shoved at his shoulder; he caught her gaze flicking downward to clock his left hand. “What’s her name?”

“Thomas.”

Anna had blinked, but recovered nicely. “No fucking kidding.”

“That’s what my mom said. No one’s more surprised than I am, trust me.”

“Well. Good for you,” she said, and he knew she meant it.

“I won’t lie, I’m still kind of heartbroken that you didn’t wait for me, but…”

She’d laughed, and hugged him tight, promised to call once in a while. The ice cream had melted by the time he got back to his parents’.

 

*

 

“Vanessa’s out of town,” Lin says when he picks up the phone.

“The crow flies at midnight.”

“What?”

“That wasn’t code?”

“No, idiot — V’s out of town, and my kid, get this, is at his first sleepover, and I’ll take ‘Lin’s weird and lonely and having a crisis or more likely several at once’ for two hundred, Alex.”

“You want some company, is what you’re saying.”

“What was your first clue? Bring bourbon. Or Xanax.”

Lin answers the door in his sweats, headphones around his neck. Same as always; steadfast, messy, stubborn Lin. He looks only mildly disappointed that Alex hasn’t actually brought substances. “Crisis, I tell you, and you doom me to sobriety.”

“Dude, I cannot deal with the two of you having meltdowns concurrently. Stagger ‘em next time, at least.”

Lin winces, sympathetically. “Are you hiding the sharp objects from him yet?”

“Not quite, but he does keep asking me to kill him over breakfast.”

Lin’s study is comfortingly cluttered, which is to say it looks like a war zone, in the particular way it does when he’s writing. Alex manages to excavate the couch from under a pile of books and sits, listens to Lin noodle around at the piano for a minute or two, just fidgeting. He’s got the next show brewing; even if he hadn’t said so Alex would be able to tell. He’s always got something brewing, but Hamilton had felt like this: change in the air like a gathering storm, the far-off rumble of thunder.  

Lin hasn’t asked for input (and he will if he wants it) but all the same Alex can’t help the tug at his ear, the itch that comes up just from a glance at his sheet music. Working with Lin has always kind of felt like hunkering down in the sandbox, seeing what they can make happen with some time and and a willingness to get dirty, with Tommy there to pull them back when they start getting carried away.

(This is not entirely unlike their non-working relationship, also, which — this train of thought is getting weird, so he’s going to stop now.)

“Quit it,” Lin says without looking up. No teeth to it, and he doesn’t stop playing.

“Quit what,” Alex says, innocently. Like he’s not already trying to flesh out string arrangements in his head (it’s a reflex, and an irritating one). He joins Lin on the bench anyway, shoulder to shoulder, can’t resist picking out a little something to lay on top of the chords Lin’s messing with to his left. Lin sighs but it’s indulgent, and he shifts over to let Alex have at it.

“Kind of miss this,” he says, mildly.

“What, me backseat-composing your shit?”

“Nah, just — like, I’m not about to turn down Disney or Sondheim or whoever the fuck, but... when it’s not you and Tommy I always kind of wish it were, you know what I mean.”

“Me too, dude.” It’s true. Alex takes a second to figure out what he’s sort of accidentally started playing; Lin recognizes it at the same moment he does, and laughs.

“Is that fucking — time for you to go out to the places you will be from…”

It’s late when Alex gets home, and he’s greeted with the sight of Tommy dozing in front of the TV, book tented on his chest. Familiar little tug at his heart that reminds him _that one, we picked that one._

Despite attempting to be gentle about it he scares the shit out of Tommy waking him up, and gets half-assedly thumped with a throw pillow for his trouble.

 

*

 

"See," comes Tommy’s voice from behind him, "the whole reason we put in a home office, you'll recall, was to work in."  
  
"I vaguely remember, yeah," Alex says, as Tommy comes out to join him, sleep-rumpled and barefoot. "Morning. Didn't wake you, did I?"  
  
"Nah."  
  
He'd come out to the balcony with a guitar just to mess around, have a few quiet minutes to himself; a glance at his phone tells him he's been out here almost an hour. GWB smack in the middle of the view against a sky so brightly blue it could be a painted backdrop. It's already hot out, should be scorching by noon. "I literally just made that," he protests, weakly, as Tommy swipes his coffee, sits down across from him.  
  
Tommy puts his feet up in Alex’s lap once he's carefully set the guitar aside and pages idly through the handful of manuscript paper scattered across the table. "What are you working on?"  
  
"Doesn't know what it wants to be yet." A snatch of melody had floated into his head before he'd even woken up fully, sixteen bars of something he'd managed to get onto paper quickly enough, and now he's got the bones of it, the foundation.  
  
"Can I hear it? Whatever you've got."  
  
Normally Tommy is Alex’s best first audience, because he _just_ listens, gets that usually all Alex wants is a sounding board. He’s picked up some of the nuts and bolts over the years but he’s not a musician and doesn’t pretend to be just because he’s married to one, which Alex dearly appreciates. He’ll sit intent and just listen, chin in hand — and Alex has watched people get thrown off by that countless times, how inscrutable he is unless you know him.

Still, Alex _is_ a musician and therefore superstitious at the best of times, so he says lightly, “Nope,” and nudges Tommy’s feet off of him, heads back inside. In the office, the guitar goes back on the stand, sheet music on the desk. Tommy’s behind him, reaches to brush fingers over his ribs, through his shirt, no real purpose. Lips just briefly on the back of his neck.

“Happy anniversary, by the way.”

“Oh, is that today?” Tommy smiles into his neck, grazes teeth over the spot just under his ear that always makes him shiver. “Okay,” Alex starts and then kind of forgets where he’s going with that statement as Tommy slips a hand under his shirt, a little more deliberately. “If the office is for working in…”

“Mhmm…”

“It follows, then, that this is _not_ what the office is for.” He’s full of shit, though, leaning into it.

“Sure,” Tommy agrees and doesn’t move. “Can’t argue with that logic.”

A shower is necessary, after a while. Following that, only occasionally surfacing for air and sustenance, they end up spending most of the day in bed, just rolling around warm and lazy. It’s good, to get to do that, a rare luxury. Neither’s working steadily at the moment and the stability is a relief, to not have to worry where their next meal is coming from.

Not that Alex has ever really had to do that — though he doesn’t come from money, not by a long shot, he’s always had the option of going to his parents in the event things get really dire. Tommy — well, Tommy’s always _technically_ had that option, too, but the first time Alex had actually asked what his relationship with his parents was like he’d said, “Ask that one-armed surfer how she feels about the shark,” so. The rare times Tommy’s been forthcoming, lubricated by liquor or weed or exhaustion, about what his early twenties were like, stick uncomfortably in Alex’s memory, and not just for their rarity. Tommy had had Backhouse, and he’d had Audra, and he’d had a basement studio with no windows and four locks on the front door, prone to flooding when it rained and half the size of the guest bedroom of the place they’re living now. He talks about it with an edge of fondness, but Alex has figured out that’s a defense mechanism. Twenty years later and he still won’t eat peanut butter.

Alex lives with a pretty constant, quiet fury over all of this, simmer low enough that he can bear it, even forget it's there on occasion. It crops up in him now like it does sometimes, bitter and surprising — he’s not an angry guy; he doesn’t know what to do with the sensation. He does need something to make sense right now, though, so he says, unprompted, “Love you.”

Tommy looks up from his book, ensconced on his side of the bed, in the nest of pillows he always sleeps with because he’s a child. “I’ll allow it,” he says, and then his face does a Thing and he softens. “Love you, too.” Alex has to kind of half-roll over and go up on his elbows to kiss him, but it’s worth it.

 

 

He wakes from a dead sleep several hours later to find that it’s pitch-black out and Tommy’s not in bed. Stumbles out to the kitchen and finds him at the table, the clock on the stove saying it’s nearing three in the morning. “What are you doing up?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Tommy says, and yawns so widely his jaw clicks.

Instead of whether he’s okay Alex asks, “You coming back to bed?”

“In a bit, yeah.” He’s prepared to leave it at that but then Tommy adds, “D’you want a shave?”

“What, really?”

“Yeah? We’re not gonna have time tomorrow, and we’re up now. Bear in mind that this offer’s void for the rest of time if your answer includes a Sweeney Todd reference.”

“Am I Lin? Have you so little faith in me?”

 

 

Tommy really does have the whole setup, lays it out on the bathroom counter, the strap and everything. The razor, unfolded, is heavy-looking, no-nonsense. Dark wooden handle polished to shining. “You sure I’ve never done this for you?” he asks, sounding skeptical.

“Very sure. Where’d you learn to do this, again?”

“This friend of my dad’s used to own a barber shop, back home. Straight out of a Mafia movie, old Italian dude. My quote-unquote uncle, you know.”

“So an old boyfriend, then?”

“No comment. Stay still.”

There’s something about having a straight razor held to your throat — not that he’s got anything to worry about, obviously, but the part of his brain that objects to having very sharp implements touching vulnerable parts of his body doesn’t really care that his husband’s not about to murder him. Still, that fades out after a few minutes — and it takes a while, longer than Alex might have expected. Quiet. Oddly meditative. Tommy’s hands steady on his throat, his jaw, every so often directing him with a soft touch or a word; Alex gets the impression he’s being extra careful. And then it’s over, clean citrusy scent of the balm in his nose and skin feeling sensitive and new.

“Slick as fuck,” Tommy says, approvingly (Alex doesn’t disagree). He hangs around to watch Tommy give himself the same treatment more out of idle curiosity than anything; this time goes quicker, practiced, just a little less cautious. Alex is definitely not going to be able to go back to disposable razors after this, he decides.

 

*

 

The party, Alex has to admit, is a success. Now that the worst of it is over, the planning, the heat’s mostly off and they can actually enjoy themselves. To his credit, Tommy seems to be trying: even after dealing with his mother all day on no sleep (she’d called, early), he’s at least managing not to betray the fact that being in the same room with her for hours at a time makes him want to die.

(There’s a dicey moment, around the hundredth time somebody ribs him good-naturedly about dragging his feet or uses the phrase “ball and chain” or something similarly asinine, that Alex thinks he might snap, but he holds it together admirably.)

Speeches are called for, after a time. Alex kind of hates doing this, still, whether on a stage or in front of all his friends and family, so when spoons start ringing off wine glasses and Tommy asks him who’s up first Alex tells him, firmly, “You are. Enjoy that.”

“Well,” Tommy says, clears his throat; the room falls silent as he stands up, straightens his tie. Up close he looks truly exhausted, but he’s smiling. “Hell of an evening, right? And before you go heaping praise on Alex and I for this, as much as we’d love it, you should know this was all my mom and dad. There they are, in the back, looking incredibly embarrassed to have two hundred people staring at them all at once — well done, everyone. Solid teamwork.” Laughter. “You think strawberries in the champagne were my idea? I was _this_ close to pouring Red Bull directly into my coffee this morning. Anyway. Moving on.” He half-turns toward Alex, clearly unsure whether he should direct this more toward the room, and then seems to decide he doesn’t give a shit. “You know, it’s not a surprise to anyone in this room that getting here was a bit of a journey — he said, wildly understating it — but now that we are… I can say, Alex, that among your manifold excellent qualities is whatever it is that makes you drag me, emphatically protesting, up to where you are. I don’t always deserve it, that’s for damn sure, but you do it every day and I adore you for it. So. Here’s to another eight years’ worth of days, and another, et cetera, et cetera, and to all of you who so graciously celebrate them with us. We’re lucky, and endlessly grateful. Thank you.”

He takes his seat again to scattered applause, a round of _aww_ s for the kiss. When Alex stands up he can see more than a few suspiciously shiny eyes, Lin and Vanessa’s among them; he’s feeling a little misty himself.

“Well, that’s tough to follow, but I guess I’ll try — knew I should’ve gone first. Okay, here goes: first of all, thank you. Tommy’s not wrong that we’re lucky, and glad you’re all here. He’s also not wrong to say it’s taken us a while to get here, which is… sometimes you look at someone and you know. Not even that you’re gonna fall in love, but that they’re gonna be important. And ten years after that you look at one of your best friends and it’s like — oh, there you are. This has been right in front of me this whole time. What _took so long._ ” Another laugh, warm. “Wouldn’t trade a day of it, though. We’re here now.” He looks at Tommy, who’s resting his chin in his hand, no trace of the tension he’s been carrying all day. “I’m gonna stop before I start crying, so — I love you. Here’s to eight more.”

“You’re alright, I guess,” Tommy says, and kisses him.

Alex doesn’t quite manage to catch up with Lin until a few hours into the evening, when almost everyone is dancing and/or thoroughly wasted. “This,” Lin says, gestures toward Tommy and Vanessa dancing halfway across the room, entwined and having what Alex assumes is the driest conversation any two people have ever had, “is, like. Bringing up some stuff for me, I’m not gonna lie.” Beyond them Alex catches sight of Tommy’s parents (he hasn’t seen much of them, either, which is admittedly by design). It’s weird — they look like him, or he looks like them, lean and pale, but that’s where the resemblance stops. Neither has any of his wit or his mannerisms, the sheer speed at which he talks thrown into sharp relief against their silences. They’re immaculately dressed and perfectly pleasant and not much more than that, as far as Alex is concerned. “You hate them, don’t you.”

“What? No,” Alex lies. Maybe half-lies.

“You _do,_ ” Lin says, with relish. “You despise them and secretly hope their plane will crash and you’ll never have to pretend to like them or understand how they manage to get _quite_ so passive-aggressive about everything, all the time, ever again.”

“That is such a cliche, that hating your in-laws thing, it’s —”

“Welcome to married life, my friend. I lucked out in that department, for who could bear to hate the people who wrought my darling angel wife upon the world, and I _still_ want to fling myself out a window when they call, sometimes.”

“That seems like a you problem,” Alex says delicately. “Look. I just think if you’re going to spend forty straight years directing all your weird emotional issues and repressiveness at your kid, you should _maybe_ not be so shocked when he moves out of state at literally the earliest possible opportunity and stays that way and only sees you when he feels like he has to. That’s it. That’s all I’m saying.”

“ _Yes._ ” The glee in Lin’s voice is undisguised. “ _There_ it is. Use it. Inform your art. I _like_ this angry Lac, he can stay.”

“Nope, sorry. Angry Lac is gone now, that was all I had, I’m over it. Are you a little bit drunk right now, do you think?”

“You are drunk,” Lin says, gravely.

He’s not, but he is hot and tired and a little overwhelmed. He and Tommy need to make the rounds at some point, put in a little face time and thank everyone for coming (there are dozens of people here he’s never met, and dozens more he has but whose names he couldn’t even begin to recall, some of whom are related to him, so that should be interesting). His own mom and dad are around here somewhere, his sister, Karen and Mandy and Quiara, Chris and Shock and the Freestyle guys. He’s not sure right at this moment if he can say the night’s been _totally_ worth all the stress it’s caused — it’s ostentatious and moderately embarrassing — but all things considered, it could’ve turned out a lot worse.

 

*

 

They have brunch with his parents and Tommy’s the next morning — which is just oil and water, an uncomfortable experience he’s not at all eager to repeat — and then pack them into cabs bound for JFK, and that’s it. Done and dusted.

“So,” Tommy tells him, when they’re blessedly alone again. Back at home in their quiet apartment and nursing mild hangovers. “As much as I’m sure you’re looking forward to sleeping for the next three weeks or so…”

“Very much.”

“I talked to Bill the other day, and his parents still have that place out in Montauk…”

“Yeah?” Alex isn’t totally sure where he’s going with this until Tommy tosses the keys onto his chest.

“You wanna get out of here for a minute?”

 

 

Cypress Hill on the way out east (care of Tommy, while Alex drives), and then _Licensed to Ill._ Andra Day, followed by half of the Mixtape, early Dessa, before she lost that octave to the Camel Lights. Nina asking them where sinnerman’s gonna run to as they pull up in front of the house.

Alex realizes a little later that they have absolutely nowhere to be for at _least_ the next week, no one wanting anything from them, no one here who knows them. No reason to wear anything other than jeans and t-shirts, nothing to schedule or confirm, the promise of all these empty hours spooling out like so much fishing line. The entire house smells like sand and salt, and out here on the back porch there’s the citronella candle burning sickly-sweet to ward off the mosquitoes. Tommy twists open a couple of beers, pop and a faint clink as the bottle caps hit the floor; he presses the wet bottle to the back of Alex’s arm, makes him jump.

“How’s that coming?” he asks, nods at the guitar Alex had brought out with him.

Alex takes a sip, considering (stalling), and then he swallows and says, “I think it’s gonna be an album.” It’s harder to get out than he’d thought it would be.  

Tommy cocks a brow, surprised. “No shit.”

“Bill’s only been on my ass about it for ten years, so. Ask me again in six months, yeah?”

“I will,” Tommy says, and they toast, and drink. Feels like summer now, with evening coming on, the sun setting over the Bay.   

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> title from Regina Spektor's "the Party". shh. I know.
> 
> Backhouse is Backhouse Productions, the theatre company Tommy cofounded "in the basement of the Drama Bookshop" with friends from college. Audra is Audra McDonald; he was her assistant for a few years during that time (yup, that Audra McDonald). 
> 
> y'all know where I am.


End file.
